


Songs for the End of the World

by th_esaurus



Category: Hannibal (TV), Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Gore, Horror, M/M, Multi, Zombie Apocalypse, romantic cannibalism, unprotected sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-08
Updated: 2014-02-08
Packaged: 2018-01-11 14:47:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1174348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the infection hits, swift and relentless, turning men into monsters and the world into a wilderness, Will Graham is one of the few who doesn't run. He's lost his wife, he has no colleagues, and Abigail Hobbs has been a ghost for such a long time; the only person he has left in the world is sitting in the dank cells of Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane.</p><p>Waiting for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act I

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of thanks to a lot of people for encouraging this to happen. Thanks to Lizzen for her cheerleading and positivity; thanks to Riona for her wonderful beta; thanks to chosenfire28 for her lovely art. 
> 
> This work was inspired by the most beautiful video game ever created, The Last of Us, and I wrote it listening to the soundtrack on repeat.

When the world turned to a living hell, Will Graham knew, with grim clarity, that the only place to be was under the wing of his own demon.

 

*

 

Florida had fled en masse across the water. At the start, without news channels, and FM radio broadcasts sketchy at best, nobody much knew if there was a safe place abroad. There was no choice. The infection was airborne, and those with the coast in their lungs sensed safety in water, though Will had spent enough time in wooden boats to know it was cruel and uncaring. The current cared nothing for the plight of man, and it would claim stragglers. Numbers weren't important. Everyone had lost track of the numbers.

 

The rich took their yachts and the poor took their fishing boats, and it was strange how no one seemed to have space for extra hands. That was the way of it in times like these. Will himself had ignored frantic knocking at his door three times. Nobody had called for him before the outbreak. In the years before that, the only visitors they'd had were Molly's friends, husbands of Molly's friends, kids of school moms Molly knew – and Jack Crawford, once. Letters came from Baltimore State Hospital, politely requesting his attendance for a chat, for a catch-up, always in the same neat hand. The letters told him he was greatly missed. He supposed that was being called for. But it barely counted.

 

Those who couldn't sail went by road. Those who couldn't make their way honestly found other means. Will had pushed his truck round the back to save the gas, jackhammered four steel rings into the hard ground and chained the truck up. It wasn't much deterrent but it'd do him a while. It'd give him time to put up a fight.

 

He was out of practice. His face tended to put people off picking fights.

 

He had only one dog right now. He figured he could leave the house open for strays, when he left. He wasn't planning to come back. Molly had taken all her shit when she'd moved out to Oregon, and Will had found there wasn't that much left. A few pieces of chipped crockery; a sofa; a camp bed he'd been sleeping on for months. The wooden floors were scratch-marked and stained in Pollockesque drips with motor oil, though Will had painted over the kitchen walls, despite Molly's one-time hash at it. The sunflower yellow gave him headaches.

 

The dog was a pointer, and a bitch, and he had thought, stupidly, about calling her Abigail. The name the shelter gave her was Tessa, and Will stuck with that in the end.

 

Dogs weren't immune. Nothing was. He had a government-issued gas mask, too small really for his ill-shapen face, but if he came across sporelands, he'd have to abandon her. He didn't want it to come to that. There was a general mistrust of animals that lingered after the infection had been mislabeled as rabies in the early days. He didn't want to leave the dog to a dull, blunt fate at the hands of desperate people with misplaced anger.

 

He kept her on a collar and leash to get her used to it while he prepared to leave. She got around his legs a lot, sensed his unease. He couldn't really do anything to comfort her.

 

Will ventured inland just once before he left. Like everyone, he'd survived and thinned out on rationed cans of long-lasting, tasteless vegetables; fished a lot from the jetty out back of his little house. He had a cupboardful of dog food still around from when he and Molly had kept six or seven of the things, which was depleting but not rapidly. He supposed if worst came to worst, the dog wouldn't begrudge sharing. If it came to it.

 

The town was a shithole. Once tourist-friendly shopfronts and cafes were identical façades of broken glass and torn awnings, trees stripped of their leaves on the promenades in misplaced rage when it was discovered the infection spawned from plantlife. A lot of axe-hewn stumps further up, though it was all poor for firewood and useless as building stock. It hadn't got cold yet. It didn't even get that cold out here in the Keys, but Will supposed people panicked. Will knew, too, that many had headed north, taking with them what they could.

 

The Canadian border was already closed. As soon as he got out of Florida, Will was traveling east.

 

His boots crunched over glass and metal like fresh snow. The shelves of every store and every house, once premium real estate, had been picked bone-clean. Will picked up the spiked pole of a gutted parasol, one that wasn't rusting too badly, and used it to batter in a few basement doors. He'd never had the qualms of some about invading abandoned houses, though it was strange to him not to have to pick police tape away from free-swinging doors first.

 

The blood was often the same.

 

Things reminded him a lot of his old line of work.

 

Will didn't entirely luck out, though he did find a few untouched shoeboxes full of food at the bottom of a kid's toy trunk; not a bad hiding place. His second priority wasn't much easier; bookstores had been emptied out because paper made perfect kindling, and could do as gauze in a fix, and the storehouses of fishing gear were long since empty, circles of dust lighter than the rest of the shelves where compasses had once sat. He tried the rickety metal stands in gas stations and convenience stores, between lighters and puzzle books, and managed to find a single, blood-flecked roadmap. Will cleaned it with his shirtsleeve.

 

He knew how to get to Baltimore. He'd tailed Jack Crawford's car, that one time. Christ, he'd done the drive from Virginia often enough.

 

He just—needed to make sure he had alternate routes.

 

Will had to get to Baltimore. He just—he had nothing else left now.

 

For parts of the walk back, he shut his eyes and let the pad of Tessa's footfalls over the broken sidewalks guide him. There were piles of corpses hidden in the shadows of doorways.

 

It was a quirk of his thinking, interested parties might once have said, that he could see vividly and instantly how every one of them died. All it took was a glance.

 

They all died terrified.

 

He'd had to stop looking once before in his life, and he wasn't about to start again now.

 

*

 

Will did not love Florida. He wasn't the sort of man to invest strong emotions in a place. He'd moved around a lot as a child, with his father; had spent much of his adult life driving the same stretch of road between Wolf Trap and Quantico – and, later, Maryland – and he'd only settled in Florida for Molly's sake and convenience. The house was still legally hers. Will was still legally hers. Estranged, they called it; the human race was estranged from itself right about now.

 

So it didn't pain him so much as give him pause for thought to see the ruins of the Sunshine State as he drove through. Houses scarred by thrown bricks and crowbars; cars abandoned, engines puttering down until the gas gave out. No traffic. No deer. Signs of life on the roadside, little huddles of backpacks and sleeping bags where families had tried to rest, to get their bearings. Maps splayed out and bloodmarked, still held down at three corners with great rocks or tins of gasoline. Sometimes there were bodies. Sometimes just parts of bodies. Will thought about scavenging supplies, but he had a good sort of speed going and a trunk with as much gas as he could hoard. So he drove on.

 

Huge swathes of forest had been burnt down in a desperate attempt by one county sheriff to contain the infected; they'd lured them in with raw meat and fresh bodies, hounded down stragglers with gunfire, and set the copse ablaze. In the early days of the infection, it would've been condemned. Now it just seemed like putting a band-aid on a third-degree burn.

 

Tessa took up half the back seat, curled around her thin stomach, whining softly. She was unused to the ride, and snuffled up occasionally to smell at Will's free hand. He petted her absently. He was thinking about Dr. Lecter. He was thinking about Hannibal.

 

It was two years since Hannibal had helped him catch a Dragon.

 

In all honesty, he did not know if the man was still alive. He'd heard horror stories – though weren't they all these days? – of prisoners abandoned by the state once the infection spread, of institutions devouring themselves from the inside out. Hannibal, he thought dryly, was not a man to be devoured. Will's jurisdiction was the law of logic, more so since he'd suffocated through insanity and come up on the other side for air, but something in his scarred gut told him Hannibal was alive. He scratched mindlessly at his belly, through his sweater. He'd lost weight when Molly had left, and more when food had become a scarce commodity, and his bitten nails dragged on the loose wool. But through it, he felt Hannibal nestled there, underneath his clothes, resting like cologne on his skin. A more expensive scent than Will ever wore.

 

For almost five years, Hannibal Lecter haunted Will in savage dreams and avoided conversations, but when the infection hit, he became the only real person Will could think of anymore.

 

He remembered quite soundly where he had been. Molly'd had the mottled sofa and armchairs shipped out to Oregon, and Will had never got round to replacing them with anything more than deckchairs in the lounge, so that was what he was sitting on, his legs splayed, two generous fingers of whiskey in a glass in his hand, the rest of the bottle close by. The television, by this time, was only news bulletins and re-runs of cartoons – to try and settle the young and fearful, the state said. There was a lot of talk of the young, these days, of sacrifices for the greater good. Will hadn't spent much of his life around kids. Never fully connected with Molly's boy, after—

 

Well, after everything that had happened. He didn't want to repeat his paternal mistakes.

 

Will had watched grainy images of doctors and scientists giving him frantic advice they didn't believe themselves about avoiding all overgrown plantlife, about traveling in groups, about staying in light spaces and wielding torches like weapons. As if the disease only took hold at night.

 

He half-listened to the daily list of missing persons. Three weeks ago, he thought he'd caught the name Bloom. He wasn't entirely sure, but he'd got drunk all the same, and he was down now to his last few bottles.

 

He didn't know whose name he was listening for. Will Graham didn't have anyone to miss. Jesus. He didn't have a single person to miss; nobody who could miss him, either, except maybe—

 

He padded upstairs, Tessa following with her head and tail low. From a cheap dresser in his sparse bedroom, he took out a few letters. They weren't dog-eared, not often read, but after Molly had left, he'd broken his habit of burning them outright.

 

Will had drunk his whiskey and read the love-letters from his psychopath, and knew, by the end of the night, that he had to go to Baltimore.

 

*

 

He drove from dusk until the middle of the next day, though he knew there was no safe time to let his guard down. Will didn't leave his car, and Tessa grew cabin-feverish, scritching at the windows and at the collar around her neck. Will fed her, fed himself, poured water from a bottle into his cupped hand and let her lap at it. He slept uncomfortably in the driver's seat, his legs propped up on the dashboard and his rest disturbed by every nearby shriek or otherworldly whine. He was used to the soundtrack but not the closeness of it. The wide world felt far more full of danger than Florida – old, humid Florida – ever had.

 

Will kept to his schedule, crossing statelines. He made brisk progress through the Carolinas, only ever seeing cars and trucks ahead of him, nothing heading south. Everyone drove selfishly, and everyone drove fast, but it didn't matter; he saw maybe three or four cars every half hour. He saw more corpses than he saw cars.

 

He drove past a group of infected, just across the Virginia border. Kept his foot on the pedal on the floor of the truck. Didn't turn back. Didn't look in his mirror to see if there was anyone still human in the throng.

 

Wolf Trap was not on his route, and Will did not detour through it.

 

He made it all the way to Maryland by road, and on the I95, twenty-some miles outside of Baltimore, Will ran out of gas.

 

He swore mildly at the steering wheel. Tessa backed him up with a placid bark, sensing his anger, and he shushed her, put his hands gently to her muzzle. He was going to have to walk and the dog would be a liability. Will stroked her jaw.

 

Will had the same sort of backpack his dad used to lug around when they went on camping trips. He had as much food as he could carry, a compass, kitchen knives, a basic sort of first-aid kit, and his gas mask. As well, he'd strapped a sleeping bag to the top, and made holsters out of belts for his guns – a very old Winchester that wouldn't be much use for anything except scaring passers-by, a Browning he'd been hunting with once or twice before the bloodspills of the deer brought up bile and bad memories, and his Smith and Wesson 459. He still had it from his years in the force. A special request, not standard issue. It was a gun he'd aimed more than once at Hannibal Lecter.

 

He kept Tessa in the front of the truck while he pushed it, grunting hard, off the road and into the ditch that ran alongside. He had a crowbar in the back, and swung blindly, denting up the rear bumper and managing to pock-mark one of the tires enough that it started to deflate. He had supplies in the truck he couldn't carry and figured it was more use as storage than as a symbol of dull hope. He wouldn't find gas in Baltimore. He had more pressing things to look for.

 

There was woodland a mile or so off to the northwest. Will hoped it was Patuxent or Patapsco Valley. He didn't want to be walking more than a day. With one hand taken up by the dog leash and the other holding the crowbar, he had no spare hand for a gun, and Jesus, night was falling, and he didn't want to be walking more than a day.

 

It was not all that important to him that he did not die.

 

It was important that when he found Hannibal, Will Graham was still human. It would be distasteful for a man who had strived so long and hard to find the perfect balance of humanity and monstrosity within Will's shell to see him, a final time, infected by a disease so far from Hannibal's own making.

 

Hannibal had always been prissy about that, Will thought without shame. That Will suffer only by his hand. Even setting Dolarhyde on his tail had been a personal machination.

 

Will heard the snap of wood on the dry ground. Too distant to be his own feet or the dog.

 

There was no point trying to be silent, so he tried to be swift.

 

His heart was loud. His heart was deafening, and he wondered if the infected could hear it, and if it sounded to them like searing meat.

 

*

 

It was dark by the time he reached the priory. The sign – uselessly welcoming the lost and needy to All Saints Sisters of the Poor – was slightly rusted but looked like it had been that way for years before the outbreak. Will treated it like a raid all the same.

 

He left his crowbar propped against an old dogwood tree, tied Tessa to a branch and gave her a few scraps of beef jerky from the side pocket of his backpack to calm her. Took his pistol in hand; let muscle memory take over.

 

The front door, unlocked, swung open easily. He approached every door from the side, leaving only his hand as a target before he deemed it safe to move in. Will had always feared at times like this. He felt it was natural, couldn't understand cops who grinned before a chase.

 

He knew there was someone in here. Evidence filed itself in his mind like pages of a photograph album: rubber marks from the soles of shoes, fingerprints on door handles. He was unnerved by the silence, as though God were watching his little house and holding his breath to see what would happen.

 

He almost felt Hannibal's hand on his back, urging him gently on into the unknown.

 

He crept into the main hall, and saw two figures at the other end, and pulled his gun up into his eyeline. He didn't shoot on sight. He never had. Even with Garrett Jacob Hobbs, he'd waited. Maybe it was a stupid habit.

 

It was two women. Not infected, not Sisters, just travelers. Just people, like him, with somewhere to reach and a place they'd found they could stay. He put his gun hand up first, then slowly raised his second, palm open in cautious submission. The dark woman, scowling and scared, trained her shotgun on him a second longer.

 

"Your face," she said roughly. "You been bit?"

 

Will had forgotten. He scrubbed at his scars with his hand. "These are older than the outbreak; trust me on that." His voice sounded foreign. He'd barely used it in a year. Phone calls to bill companies and soft words to his dog.

 

The woman lowered her gun. Her companion's shoulders seemed to relax. Neither of them offered Will a name or a handshake, and that was fair enough. Will was looking for a place to catch a few hours' sleep, not friendship.

 

He brought his dog in from the outside, and the animal eased the air between them all. The smaller of the two women held out her hand and Tessa snuffled at it, licked her fingers where there might have been the scent of food.

 

"What's her name?"

 

"Tessa," Will said. "I was going to call her Abigail." He didn't know why he said that.

 

"I knew a girl called Abigail once."

 

"Me too," Will said. He didn't offer any more.

 

They sat the early evening out on sleeping bags, eating their own scraps of meat and not sharing. Will had never been good at small talk, and was glad it wasn't expected of him. He looked around at the priory hall and could tell, from the dust patterns and window marks, that it had always been as spare and sad as it was now. It was a comforting thought, somehow. Comforting to find something unchanged in a world made new by unfamiliarity.

 

The dark woman watched him. Her hair was shorn, perhaps for practicality, and her hands never strayed too far from her gun. She sat protectively close to her companion. "Where you heading?" she asked, eventually.

 

Will hadn't had opportunity to practice eye contact in the last few years, and didn't even try. He petted Tessa, and used her as distraction. "No further than Baltimore."

 

"Looking for something or someone?"

 

Will shrugged noncommittally.

 

"Family?"

 

"You could say."

 

"Don't pry, Evelyn," the smaller woman murmured. The slip-up, the use of a name, earned her a stern glance.

 

Will sighed, wanted to clear the air. Dishonesty had plagued him his whole adult life, and there was just no use for it anymore. "I'm looking for a man who tried to kill me."

 

There was short, sharp silence. Then Evelyn nodded. "We've talked to people looking for purpose, looking for God. Never talked to anyone looking for revenge."

 

"It isn't that," Will said simply. He shrugged, felt the scar on his belly through his jacket, felt the way his skin went from sensitive to blank. As though there were a slice of him that would forever be calm.

 

"He's the only person I ever felt safe with. That's why I have to find him."

 

*

 

Will reached the hospital just after midday, when the sun was straining.

 

He walked through Baltimore in a daze. He'd never paid much attention to the streets, only ever traversing them in Hannibal's company. It had been his job to be observant, so in that rare and valued downtime, he had kept his eyes on his feet and let Hannibal see for them both. He took more than a few wrong turns.

 

Will had returned to Baltimore only once in the interim, on Jack's whim. He wondered if Jack Crawford was dead now. He suspected not. A hardy man; hard to sway, more so to kill.

 

Tessa nudged her nose into overturned trashcans, scavenged for all but plastic, and she grizzled at decaying bodies on doorsteps and street benches. Will breathed through his mouth to avoid the stench. But Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was set aside from the city like a health hazard of its own, nestled among fraying woodlands. Will shuffled down a gravel track he'd crossed more than once before – by foot and by car and, though he never dwelt on it, in the back of a secure van, wearing handcuffs and thinking about breaking his own thumb.

 

He dragged his heels, kicked at the stones. Walked slow still once the hospital came into view. He'd found it imposing, not so long ago; his nerves were maybe down to other factors now.

 

The building itself was cracked open like broken ribs. The roof had almost entirely collapsed on the left side. The sun behind it made it look aflame, and it had been once, judging by the blackened bricks and the crumpled nameplate that still managed to read _Criminally Insane_.

 

There was a dark figure standing in front of the low outer wall that might have been a man, and might have been the devil. It was hard for Will to tell with the sun in his eyes.

 

He was wearing a charcoal-grey suit, and his legs were crossed at the ankle as he leaned against the ledge the wall made. The suit was not tailored, just off-the-shelf, but it was still an impressive find in these squalid times. Will himself was wearing a shirt he'd bought four years ago or more. Perhaps Molly had bought it. The dark shape in front of the hospital ruins was reading a hardback book. Will could not make out its spine from this distance. He'd stopped, with four yards between them, and his feet would bring him no closer.

 

He had some scrap of self-preservation in him, Will thought dully.

 

Hannibal Lecter looked up from his book, and he smiled.

 

"Hello, Will," he said.

 

He put his book upon the wall, uncrossed his legs. He looked – slim. Healthy, though. It was a jolt to see him again out of his prison overalls. As though nothing had happened between them in the last five years, ever since Will had cast him a wary glance and put up his shield of sarcasm in Jack Crawford's Quantico office.

 

"Come here," Hannibal said, quite softly. "Let me look at you."

 

"You looked at me plenty last time," Will managed. Jesus, had he thought this through at all? Had he expected to just – fall into Hannibal's familiar embrace, to cower under his protection against the cruelty of the world once more, no ill will between them? No sordid exchange of frantic, angry words? Nothing?

 

Hannibal nodded lightly, motioning him closer.

 

Will's dog obeyed the command first, and he let the leash slip out of his hand as she trotted over to Hannibal, curious. He held his palm out for Tessa to sniff, then raised a stern finger, commanding her to sit. Her rump hit the gravel with a stony thwack, she obeyed so fast.

 

Will went to him. Christ, what else could he do? He'd come all this way.

 

Hannibal looked him over, not entirely coldly. Will realized Hannibal had never seen him with his scars, and turned his face away a little. Hannibal raised the hem of Will's ratty sweater, his plaid shirt, and looked at the signature he'd carved into Will's belly. "I treated you very poorly," he said, not sounding particularly remorseful.

 

"No shit," Will replied bitterly, his voice harsh even as his whole body leant into Hannibal's palm.

 

"We have all the time in the world to mend our wrongs," Hannibal told him, and his smile was so very genuine. Will couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a smile like that, not in this new world built on unhappy cries and desperate screams.

 

He took a step closer to Hannibal, and their shoes bumped together, and Will's were dusty and mud-caked, and Hannibal's were clean.

 

There was a rustling sound from the forest to the east. Will's head snapped to it. For a moment, he'd almost forgotten that—

 

Hannibal put a steadying hand on Will's hip and made no move to run. He looked between the trees, and Will followed his gaze, and thought he'd been a terrible fool. At least they'd die together. That was always how it should have been, wasn't it?

 

A shape Will couldn't entirely parse made itself known where the trees thinned out. It wasn't the half-crouched, jerking form of a long-gone infected, but the upright stride of a human, something at its feet, crawling behind. No, no, maybe – something being dragged.

 

She had long, dark hair and strands of it clung to her sweating cheeks. A shabby rifle in one hand, she dragged along behind her the corpse of a headless infected, shot through from chest to spine three times. Her skin was very pale, but not through exhaustion. She looked like she had been born pale, and had spent long summers in hunting jackets and fingerless gloves rather than swimsuits and tees.

 

She looked too old for her face.

 

Or she was just older than when Will had seen her last.

 

His knees went out from under him before his mind put everything together, his thoughts slow as though to protect him. Hannibal's grip on his waist tightened and both arms came solidly around Will to hold him up.

 

The girl ran to them.

 

Abigail Hobbs dropped her quarry and her gun and ran to them.

 


	2. Act II

The last time Will had seen Abigail Hobbs was in his nightmares, and she had been dead. He had killed her, and Hannibal had killed her, and she had killed herself to spite them both. He had spent five years wondering what he could have done to keep her alive, and the answer was always nothing.

 

He had never brought up having children with Molly, because he was terrified – even though Molly had hair like straw and tanned so easily she was always copper – that his child would look like Abigail. That he would raise a child like Abigail and fail her as completely as Garrett Jacob Hobbs had failed his daughter.

 

As completely and utterly as Will already had.

 

Perhaps the answer to why he could never save her in his dreams was that she had saved herself.

 

She stretched out her arm like an animal tamer, and Will cowered from it. He did not want her to touch him. If she touched him, it meant she could forgive him, and he didn't know if he could reciprocate.

 

"Abigail has missed you very much," Hannibal murmured softly, close to his ear, like sweat.

 

"You bastard," Will hissed, lacking venom. He pressed his whole side into Hannibal's chest as though trying to climb inside his jacket, where it might be soft and safe and where Abigail might still be dead.

 

"Will," she said, and his own name was painful on her lips. Her voice sounded the same. Her body had filled a little and her face had hardened and set like clay around its adult bones, but her voice sounded exactly the same. "Let's – let's go inside. It isn't – it'll be easier inside."

 

She did not say it was safe inside.

 

*

 

Hannibal led him into the corpse of his old hospital. Abigail took a while longer; she had to burn the body of her kill, she explained carefully. It neutralized the infection, stopped it spreading. This was common knowledge – there had been a pyre in Florida, some miles out from the Keys, and Will had sat on his porch with Tessa and watched its distant burn some nights, watched the smoke rising like a porous black tar, blotting out the stars. It had stopped burning with such regularity some months back, and ceased altogether in the weeks before Will left. There was nobody to light the fire anymore.

 

Will nodded anyway, numbly. He couldn't look Abigail in the eye. He'd gotten over that for a while, with Molly, and lost the habit again when he lost her.

 

The east wing of the hospital was mostly intact. Will remembered the layout of the place more than he cared to admit, though Hannibal led him through the halls and doorways by the arm. The place smelled faintly rotten, like old eggs, a stench Hannibal might once have balked at, with all his airs and graces, but now apparently tolerated or had gotten so used to that even his olfactory sensitivity could brush it aside.

 

No noise at all came from below, where the cells were nestled. Not a whimper.

 

Will looked at Hannibal as they walked. His hair was combed back, neat and presentable, and his chin fairly freshly shaven – though perhaps not as closely as it could be, perhaps with not as sharp a blade as he'd like. His suit was beginning to wear at the elbows. He looked – handsome in a way Will was unused to. European and angular, aged, silver-haired at the temple and wrinkled around his eyes with laughter lines he didn't deserve. It had struck him too, at his last visit, the appeal of looking at Hannibal he'd never managed to shake. It hadn't turned his gut at the time, and he blamed it on the dead skin of old wounds.

 

Hannibal had always been able to read his thoughts, and he said bluntly, "You are not as ugly as I feared, Will. Francis considered himself an artist, I believe."

 

"He was his own masterpiece," Will said, uneasy to talk of Dolarhyde; another ghost.

 

"Perhaps not," Hannibal murmured.

 

"You've kept a prettier pet," Will said. He hated the words as he said them.

 

Hannibal let out a small, low laugh. "You and Abigail have both learnt some spite over the years."

 

Will felt himself fall. Hannibal let him this time. He realized, as his knees hit the hard floor, how abjectly tired he was. He knelt with his face against the cool concrete for as long as it took him to feel like he could move without retching and, kindly, Hannibal waited. Tessa, following behind, nosed wetly at Will's ear, and her panting sounded like the ocean. Hannibal shooed her sternly, brought her to his heel and kept her there without fuss.

 

Will opened and closed his hands against the concrete, as though trying to find parts of himself he had shattered.

 

Abigail jogged up behind him. She stank of burnt wood and meat, and trailed ash in her footsteps. She put her hot hand on his neck and Will moaned, even before she asked if he was okay.

 

"Look at her, William," Hannibal said, very directly. Will kept his nose to the ground. "Look."

 

He turned to face her. Soot and blood were smeared on her cheek, and he wanted very badly to lick his thumb and wipe her skin clean.

 

"You did not kill her, Will," Hannibal told him. "Repeat it until you believe it."

 

The two of them carried Will the rest of the way between their open arms, all the while Will muttering like a mantra into Abigail's hair that he did not kill her. He did not kill her.

 

He did not kill her.

 

Perhaps they did not smell it because of the burnt aura that haloed Abigail. They gave off a sort of rotting smell, like trash cans or compost. Not strong enough to warn from a distance, but in this close space, they should have known.

 

The infected came upon them ravenous and crazed.

 

It went like this: Abigail's arm came out from under Will and pulled a revolver from the back of her waistband, hidden under her jacket. She moved in front, steady and graceful, and Will deliriously thought how much she looked like a cop, her feet square, her shoulders and hands triangulated. Will had his crowbar but not his wits, and he flinched when Hannibal's hand landed flat on his stomach, leading him aside as though they were only dancing. He had a Derringer in his right hand. "Flank Abigail," he ordered Will brusquely. "Don't get in her way."

 

Will had seen an infected this close up only once before, and he had lost two dogs in that attack.

 

They looked like crude sketches of humans, eyes not quite in the right place, bodies moving in jerks and patterns, skin sickly, the color of under-sunned leaves. There were two, and one was further gone, hard tendrils like coral sprouting from its ear and temple. Their teeth were bloody, and broken where they'd bitten bone in their haste for meat.

 

Abigail took one down with a headshot. It sprayed blood, and Will hadn't expected that. He'd expected them, somehow, to be empty. There was nothing inside, after all, that resembled a human mind – why should there be anything else human? But it echoed her shot with a ricochet of blood that hit Abigail's cheek and the dank hospital walls, and sent the one behind it into a frenzy.

 

It was strange for Will to witness a murder with his eyes and not his mind.

 

He did not know if this could be called murder.

 

Hannibal let off a shot or two while Abigail reloaded. One grazed the beast's shoulder, and it made an awful howling, scratched at its own skin as though trying to dig the wound out with its fingernails. Hannibal still had his hand on Will, and the recoil shuddered through him. Will finally found his wits and moved back to back with Hannibal, his crowbar rusty and raised, to cover Abigail's unprotected blind spot. The hospital corridor loomed long and dark in front of him.

 

He wondered, dully, why their ruckus hadn't attracted noise from the prisoners left below.

 

It had caught something's attention, at least.

 

He felt the glass shatter before he realized what it was. The window to his left seemed to explode around him, and Will felt claws on his shirt, at his neck, dragging him towards the wall. The noise in his ear sounded like a sucking scream, and the breath against his cheek left flecks of dark pollen. He held his breath desperately.

 

Abigail felled the infected in front of her with a bullet to the ankle. She turned on her heel, raised her gun at Will, barely aimed, and fired. The grip on Will's chest and neck slackened instantly.

 

With her aim an inch more to the left, she'd have shot Will clean through.

 

But she didn't. And Will knew that she never would.

 

"Your face—" she said, pocketing her gun and running to him. "Did it—"

 

"No," he said, slumping against the wall. "No, it didn't bite—"

 

Hannibal strode over to Will first. Checked he was not wounded, nodded sternly. He went to the infected Abigail had brought down, still mewling and clawing at the floor.

 

He saved himself an extra bullet and put it out of its misery with a clean stomp to the head. The crack of its skull, made frail by winding roots, echoed in the long hallway. Will looked at the corpse and felt nothing. Felt nothing of the sick anger that used to drown him in the old days, when he saw people butchered on a daily basis.

 

It wasn't a person. Just the remains of some – thing that he had not a single ounce of empathy with.

 

Christ, he was glad of it. He swallowed a burbling laugh.

 

"I came here to feel safe," he said, finally.

 

"You are safe," Hannibal told him, straightening his shirt collar.

 

Abigail's eyes were just as bright as Will remembered. She glanced back at Hannibal, and when she met Will's eyes for the brief moment he allowed it, she looked more earnest and open than perhaps he had ever seen her.

 

"I know," Will said, swallowing. He put his hand on Abigail's waist to steady himself. "I know I am."

 

*

 

His exhaustion caught up with him. It wasn’t even approaching dark, but Will needed to sleep and felt, for the first time in a long while, like he could, now that his back was covered.

 

Hannibal and Abigail's makeshift home was Chilton's old office, and Hannibal noted dryly that he had been kind enough to leave all his books when he had fled the hospital. A lacking collection, he said. Chilton had abandoned the place as soon as it had become apparent that prisons and institutes were not high on the government's list of sudden priorities. "He had a naïve sense of self-preservation," Hannibal said coldly.

 

"We found him in the grounds a few weeks after we settled," Abigail said, shrugging. She hadn't let go of Will's arm since the attack. "He was long dead."

 

"How long have you been here?" Will asked, low, turning his mouth towards Abigail.

 

She held his arm tighter.

 

The two of them had dragged up several cots from the cells, tripled up the mattresses for comfort and covered them with sheets to make a double bed – just one, Will noticed, but he hadn't the energy to think on it now. Hannibal offered it to him graciously, waved away Abigail's protest that Will needed to eat; "He shall eat when he's ready to," he said, and there was a significance to his voice that Will didn't care to analyze.

 

He took off his shirt but left his socks on, in case they needed to run, fast.

 

"We'll keep watch," Hannibal said, and it was a shock how soft his voice could be. "Take your rest, Will." He ushered Abigail from the room and pulled down the blinds as Will climbed achily into bed – all at once so similar to the camp bed he'd been on in Florida, since Molly had left him, but with a different scent, different dips and valleys in the mattresses from the weight of two bodies, not one thinning man and his dog sleeping at the end. Tessa sniffed at the sheets, seemed satisfied, and jumped up into her usual spot.

 

It was almost – homely.

 

Hannibal paused in the darkened room before he left. Maybe he looked at Will or maybe he was turned away; Will couldn't tell in the shadows.

 

"I'm glad you've come back to us, Will," Hannibal said finally. "I am glad we are – on the same side of the cage again."

 

Will said nothing. He nodded shortly, and it was lost in the darkness.

 

*

 

He didn't know how long he slept; maybe hours or maybe a day. Will was woken gradually by the slow slide of a small body climbing into the bed behind him. Molly had always liked to spoon him from behind, to wrap her arms around his belly, though she never laid her palms on the dead skin of his scar.

 

Nobody clung to him tonight. Abigail drew her arms up to her own chest, pressed them tight against Will's back, her knees bumping against the back of his. His breath came in sleepy shudders.

 

He'd never wondered what to say to her, because she'd been dead. She'd been dead, and he had killed her, either by proxy or with his own hands, and Will couldn't abide talking to ghosts and memories anymore. It had been his life for so long, conversing with the dead, asking their secrets, that he just couldn't do it these days.

 

"What are you thinking, Will?" Abigail said, her voice less than a whisper.

 

He swallowed hard. She sounded young, still. He guessed she must be – twenty-three? Twenty-four? It was strange how five years could be a lifetime, and no time at all.

 

"Thinking about liars and thieves," Will sighed.

 

Abigail pressed closer against his back, her mouth almost against his neck. He could feel just the faintest brush of her bottom lip, a few strands of dark hair. When she swallowed thickly, she almost kissed him.

 

"I went to Europe," she said, unsteadily. She could stand tall and unshaking and shoot a monster between the eyes, but she could barely speak to him. Will understood that, at least. "Lithuania, first. Hannibal has a home there still, did you know that? I guess not. I mean. He told me it wasn't safe to stay there, I had to keep moving, but it was a starting point. It was like chess, you know? Moving and stopping and moving again when it was safe.

 

"He wrote me, when you came to visit him here."

 

"It was hardly a courtesy call," Will muttered.

 

"No, but – he was pleased to see you. He told me you looked – good. Healthy. Tanned, he said, from all that southern sun."

 

"Did he tell you he set a murderer on me?"

 

"Yes." She lifted a hand between them and placed the tip of her index finger just above Will's cheekbone, just at the edge of his deepest scar. She wasn't at a good angle to trace the whole thing, so her fingers shied away again.

 

Will wanted badly to turn and take her face in his hands. He wanted to look at every inch of her and see what was the same and what was different. He wanted to map how much she'd come to look like Garrett Jacob Hobbs as she'd grown, and how much she had erased every trace of him.

 

"Everything he did – everything we did," Abigail said, that shaking whisper again, "was to heal you, not hurt you."

 

"I don't know how well that plan worked out for you both," Will said. He was trembling. Jesus, he was tired still.

 

"You're here with us now," Abigail told him, and maybe she did kiss him, or maybe it was just the way she moved when she swallowed again. "So it worked."

 

Tessa whined in her sleep at the end of the bed. Will didn't move for a long time. Abigail's toes curled against the backs of his ankles.

 

He thought about her, always on the move, chasing winds across Europe while he was static in the Florida Keys, desperately trying to plant roots; while Hannibal fought to stop his mind rotting in a Baltimore prison cell. She must've flown back to America right at the start of the outbreak, before the airports shut down and the world became more insular than it had ever been. She must have moved from hotel to hotel with Hannibal's money, waiting for the hospital to rip itself apart, always trusting that Hannibal would emerge at the top of the rubble; always trusting that Will would seek him out sooner or later. Hannibal was the axis they both turned around, the two of them poles and Hannibal the hot center.

 

Will felt like he should be repelled by her.

 

Instead, he shuffled over, turned onto his side and pulled her against him before she could meet his eyes. She burrowed her face into his collarbone, pushed her thigh between his legs where it was warmest, wrapped her arms around his back and clutched at his shoulder blades. He mouthed openly at her forehead, the bridge of her nose.

 

"I'm here," she said. "I'm here."

 

"I didn't kill you," Will said, to himself more than her, but she murmured in agreement.

 

"You didn't kill me," she told him. "I promise. I keep my promises now, you know."

 

He choked out a laugh.

 

"Go back to sleep, Will," Abigail told him. "I'm here."

 

*

 

He settled into their routine with guilty ease.

 

Their veneer of small civilization was entrancing. Will didn't know how much he'd missed intelligent conversation until Hannibal invited him to sit one evening, while Abigail was on her regular perimeter hunt. They sat on Chilton's leather armchairs, across from each other in an echo of so many evenings before, back when they were civil and close, and Hannibal made freeze-dried coffee from the hospital stockroom that they sipped like Italian espresso. He asked Will about the outside world – not just the infection, but everything before that, inhaling every snippet of cultural and political gossip Will could scrounge up with his eyes closed and a pleasant smile playing on his thin lips. He laughed to hear of the downfall of government, liked most when Will told him how man had turned on his fellow man in the desperate scramble for survival. The unearthing of humanity's true nature satisfied him very deeply, and Will couldn't fault him for that. He had, as a man among murderers, known it all along.

 

When Will had had enough talk, they sat in comfortable silence, read Chilton's medical tomes and untouched books of poetry he'd only ever had on his shelves for decoration. Hannibal read a few stanzas aloud that he enjoyed, and Will nodded in appreciation.

 

Molly hadn't cared for political debate or poetry. She liked physical pleasures: the salty wind, the feel of sand beneath her toes, and sex, too.

 

Hannibal was not much curious about her. Will had a pale band still on his ring finger where he'd worn it so long and tanned around it, and Hannibal frowned at the mark sometimes: a signifier of another's ownership over Will. Will often rubbed it absently in Hannibal's company, scratched at the scars on his belly and cheek too. So many people had a stake in Will Graham.

 

The scars Abigail had left on him were harder to find.

 

Will patrolled with her often, both of them with their hunting rifles, though Abigail held hers more easily. She didn't cajole him into conversation, but was happy to talk for them both, quietly, as they trudged through the thick underbrush. She told him of her time in Europe, of her correspondence with Hannibal, her return to the US. She told him of her kills. They were few, and to her mind necessary, and Will did not judge her. He couldn't let himself. It had ruined so much before.

 

"Hannibal's let himself settle here, but I'm not sure about it," she admitted to him once. "We can't stay here forever. Ammo will run out, food's gonna get low, or someone'll find this place and take it over. There are places – Canada, sure, everyone says Canada's overrun with refugees – but DC too, I've heard. I don't know how long we can hold out."

 

"You're doing surprisingly well," Will said, and Abigail hefted her rifle on her shoulder, smiled a little with shy pride.

 

"Maybe. I don't know. Now we're not waiting for you anymore – I don't know."

 

"Did you know I would come?" Will asked carefully, quietly.

 

"Of course," Abigail said, with an open simplicity in her voice and in her eyes, as though it were obvious.

 

They took out three infected that day, burnt them all, and went inside for dinner.

 

Will was only eating his own food at this point. He'd denied the emptiness of the place and Hannibal's well-stocked basement freezer – powered by an old generator that Will was confident he could fix up and keep running for years – for as long as he could, but there was no sense in it anymore.

 

Hannibal had not been here alone when Chilton had abandoned the place.

 

Will ate his canned vegetables and frowned deeply when Hannibal leant down to feed table scraps to the dog.

 

"She must eat, Will," he said flatly.

 

"Jesus. Fine. Jesus. Just don't involve me in this, okay?"

 

He had some dried and, by now, stale beef jerky in his backpack, and he allowed himself a single strip every night, for the protein. It was getting him through. It was just about getting him through.

 

It was the nights that made him gladdest he had come. One of them always had to be awake to keep watch, but Will found himself content in every arrangement. Since his arrival, no one had bothered with the pretense of setting up an extra bed. On his own night shifts, he would watch Hannibal and Abigail sleep for hours, even when his attention should've been on the windows and doorways. Abigail could take care of herself, but seemed vulnerable asleep, her face free of its worry lines and focus. She had a habit of burrowing into Hannibal's arms, like a kid with nightmares tucked into her father's bed. In certain lights and shadows, Will thought he saw two monsters curled around each other in the sheets like an ouroboros, devouring itself endlessly.

 

He never balked at the sight.

 

He and Hannibal tended to sleep back to back, but close enough to touch. Will still sweated in his sleep, a habit he'd never shaken, and always dozed with a T-shirt on. He had woken in the small hours more than once to find Hannibal watching him, or tracing his scars with a fingertip where his shirt had rucked up in restlessness. Hannibal was not a sentimental fool, but he had his foibles. Will truly believed Hannibal had missed him.

 

Once, he put his hand over Hannibal's on the skin of his belly, and pushed it flat, and felt the empty stirrings of his gut, or maybe a vague sense of arousal. Hannibal hummed in low appreciation. It didn't feel significant or new so much as a continuation of something long paused.

 

But that was all that happened.

 

Will and Abigail were less subtle about it.

 

He had denied missing her for so long that it compounded all his sharp focus onto her small, lean body, now that it was in his arms. She had grown muscle from bearing the kick of a rifle and running from men and demons; she could pin him, if she wanted to. Instead, she let him spoon her. She told him she wanted to give him his power back, and it sounded like she was quoting someone.

 

One mellow evening, Hannibal offered Will a glass of deep red wine, and the way he handed it over told Will that it was neither plentiful nor to be refused. He sipped it languidly, watched the way Abigail's own glass made her lips burgundy and her eyes dozy. It was Will's night watch, but Hannibal waved the technicality aside.

 

Will's memory of the last time he'd fucked was hazy; at the time, he hadn't known it would be the last. It was breezy and warm, Molly's thighs thick and freckled around his waist, and she always put her own pleasure first. He liked it that way, liked that they could both be selfish for a while.

 

After Dolarhyde had left his marks on their lives and Will's cheeks, Molly's self-interest had manifested quite differently. She'd left him within the month.

 

He whispered all this to Abigail in dull tones as she pressed her thigh against his crotch. "It's the end of the world," she said simply. "We're all selfish now."

 

She kissed him only after they had both come. He preferred it that way; the kiss broke him apart more than anything.

 

*

 

It was Will, in the end, who got them on the move. Abigail had been appealing to Hannibal's common sense, his keen eye for self-preservation, but Will chased down his vanity.

 

"Abigail tells me there's a refuge in Washington DC," he said bluntly, following Hannibal into the basement. Will didn't venture down there often, among the generators and half-full freezers, but he distracted himself with his own voice; with Hannibal's sardonic replies.

 

"So she says. In the White House, of all places." He would have snorted, were he a more open man. "I've heard these stories before, William."

 

Will shrugged, lingered around the bottom step while Hannibal busied himself selecting meat for their dinner. Will had taken stock of his own supplies that afternoon – cans of vegetables mainly, now – and found them severely lacking. He wished he'd taken more with him from the truck. Wishes were always easy in hindsight.

 

"You've been cut off for a real long time," he said, picking at the lining inside his jean pockets. "Being sectioned isn't exactly conductive to good company."

 

"We would both know," Hannibal said flatly.

 

"Don't get petty. Think about it. A hundred or so swarthy survivors, slim pickings and a cultural hotpot, all outclassed by the grandeur of the damn White House? You'd be a goddamn prince, Dr. Lecter."

 

"You're unsubtle, Will," Hannibal murmured. He picked a wrapped cut of dark meat from one of the lower shelves of his freezer, turned it over in his hands. The bag holding it swam with frozen blood.

 

Will shrugged again. "I'm aiming low."

 

He and Abigail had spoken together in hushed tones that previous night, their limbs curled around each other and strands of Abigail's coarse hair clinging to Will's bottom lip. Their stockpile of bullets, mainly hoarded by Abigail in raids on the city, or taken from the belts of dead security men in the hospital grounds, was dangerously slim. They had talked about practicalities, and they had talked about Hannibal. They were common topics of conversation these days.

 

"We shall have dinner," Hannibal said, and came to Will at the bottom of the stairs, and put his hand on Will's arm. "And I shall think about it."

 

*

 

Will and Abigail combed the building with a weak flashlight for any weapons they might have missed, hidden boxes of bullets, loose piping and abandoned tools. Hannibal was still frowning deeply at Chilton's library when they returned close to empty-handed. He had room for three of the larger tomes, or perhaps four or five slimmer. Most of Hannibal's pack was taken up with medical supplies he had cleaned meticulously in ice water, along with the practicalities – his sole spare shirt, his Derringer, a pair of Chilton's shoes that were a little tight for him but would do in a fix – and the books. He had another handheld that carried a decent amount of meat, though they were mainly down to offal now. It would last a few days out on the road before it began to rot.

 

The walk to DC, if they kept pace, was not long. But it could be made longer. They all knew why.

 

Will counted his cans of carrots and peas again, as though they might have multiplied overnight. He was a logical man, and hated himself for the absurdity. Tessa sniffed at his neck and armpits, agitated by the coming change. Will himself was unsure of it all. His life had long been unsettled, right back from his first days on duty, his head swimming with the realities of emotion until he had pulled away from the pack, holstered his pistol, and vomited down a back alley half way through the chase.

 

None of his anchors had lasted long. Hannibal and Abigail felt, for all their distance, like constants by now, like rocks in shifting sand he could not lift his feet from. They could not have settled here. He doubted they would settle in DC, if there were anything to settle in save for rumors and hearsay.

 

Nonetheless, a country boy, Will yearned. Put his mouth against Abigail's neck at night, his fingers sewn between Hannibal's, and yearned for the nights to stretch on and on and on.

 

They made their move just before dawn, when the witching hour had passed and the outside world was as safe as it would ever be.

 

Hannibal, strangely, was the only one of them who looked back at the sad husk of the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Will, instead, looked at his eyes and found no answers. Hannibal was as hard to decipher as ever, and he always would be, and Will Graham would always be grateful for the silent calm of Hannibal's deep gaze.

 

*

 

They talked little and moved much.

 

Stuck to the forests where they could, and when Maryland opened up before them, they stuck to each other.

 

It was on the second day that Will knew they were being followed. He knew it not from the scent of the wind or the steady rustling that stalked them, but from the way Abigail's grip tightened on her shotgun. The way her jaw set like it had, a long time before, when she had talked with Will in whispers about killing unrighteous men.

 

Hannibal held Will back. "Let her take care of it," he said, low and composed.

 

"Sure."

 

"Let her take the dog. As a distraction."

 

Will hesitated. "Sure."

 

They sat on the uncomfortable buffers at the side of the highway while Abigail and Tessa broke off. Will checked his gun was fully loaded. It was. His hands were shaking.

 

Everything was quiet around them. Both men listened for gunshots and heard nothing for a very long time. A haphazard queue of cars lined the road intermittently, all abandoned, and to keep himself busy Will rooted through a few open trunks. He found nothing of use. Found memories and agonies, keepsakes neglected through necessity. He found a wasps' nest formed angrily around the black, rotten core of an apple, in the footwell of a busted Chevy. He found a tape still in the deck of another car with _songs for the end of the world_ scribbled on it in ballpoint pen. He found a family photo, or what he assumed was one – he couldn't will himself to turn it over, just read several times the inscription on the back: _Jenny and all of us at the lodge, 2007_.

 

Will sat down on the back seat. His legs felt thin and weak, and his breathing labored. He fished in his bag for something to eat, took out a can of corn past its long shelf-life, pressed it under his nose as though the smell of it would keep him moving. As though he could smell it at all between the metal and the mold.

 

Two bullet wounds pierced the air. A third. Shattered barking.

 

A long time ago, a monster of a man had tried to shoot Will Graham's family right in front of him. He had made no vow never to let the same thing happen again, because it was not the sort of lightning that struck twice.

 

He ran towards the noise, and wished he had bargained harder with Fate.

 

The grass was dry and crackled under his worn shoes; he skidded a little when he hit dirt. Will knew better than this, knew better than to make so much noise, but his ears were ringing with gunshots and he hadn't the sense to hear his own footfalls. He got his Smith and Wesson in his sweating palm far too late.

 

There was no cover in the starving autumn trees and he was obnoxious and obvious. He needed to get to Abigail.

 

Will saw the body below her before he saw Abigail herself. She looked like an ancient goddess somehow. Men fell at her feet. They always had. Even her father; even Will.

 

The body's spine was twisted grotesquely from a heavy fall, and it was bleeding from the chest. The earth drank it up, vampiric and desperate. Will saw but did not immediately register the cleanness of it, the fact there was no halo of spit-up pollen, no chunks of that rotting, off-green coral spattered among the dirt.

 

"Abigail," he managed. He was breathless, unfit.

 

She did not turn to him. Instead, she reloaded her rifle, put the butt of it against her shoulder, pointed down, and fired. The rebound made her take three steps back. A grey-black shape skittered out from behind a distant tree, kicking up the mud and whining at a pitch just higher than the ringing gunshot. The shape fled, and Abigail lowered her gun, and the dead man at her feet oozed pitifully.

 

It was just a man. There was a dead woman a stone's throw away, the back of her head blown open. Her hair, under the blood, was greying.

 

"They would have killed us," Abigail said, her voice shaking where her hands were not. "They knew we had food, tried to bargain with me. They would have killed us eventually."

 

"Would they?" said Will. His heart thumped like a dull brick thrown against his ribcage. His body, more and more traitorous these days, dropped him to one knee.

 

"Would they?" he said, quieter.

 

*

 

When he came round, it was to the scent of burning wood, and meat. Abigail had a palm on his forehead. Hannibal had lit a fire, and it blazed just out of his vision, tinting the world orange. He was flat on his back on the ground, and the sky was not much hidden by the leafless trees; they were near the roadside, and evening was drawing in. Hannibal's greatcoat lay underneath him. It was soft, not straw-like and static-y, not cheap. Chilton's. The only thing in Will's body with the energy to move was his bruised heart. It was just muscle. That was all people were. Just muscle and fat and marrow.

 

Abigail held his hand tightly. When he had been in hospital, when he had been told his face would be disfigured for life, Molly hadn't touched him. She had sat at the other end of the white hospital room and talked at him, not with him.

 

"Tessa's gone," he murmured.

 

"You're awake," Abigail said, to herself, and then: "Yes. Yeah. She fled. The shots scared her too badly, I think."

 

"All right," Will said, and took in a deep, shuddering breath.

 

Even as a child, he had found it stupid to deny the brief, ephemeral nature of everything in his life. His father had never shielded him from the death of his mother. He had never been able to console his peers at school over the loss of pets, grandparents, fickle romances. He never knew what to say. He did not understand his own empathy, at that age, and thought that the touch of a hand was enough to convey all the emotions that were too painful to acknowledge aloud.

 

His teachers found him cold. But they were never his teachers for long.

 

Abigail helped him up, brushed the browning leaves out of his hair where he had fallen. Her fingers lingered where they didn't need to on his cheeks and jaw, and he kissed her fingertips mildly. She walked him over to the fireside, sat him close to her, close between herself and Hannibal.

 

There were flayed strips of flesh hanging over the fire, two Y-shaped branches stuck fast into the dirt with a third stretched across them to act as a grill. Always civilized, Hannibal had seasoned it all with a carefully measured spice mix he had bottled and taken with them from the hospital. He passed a few browned pieces across to Abigail on a handkerchief, so she could rest it on her knees and eat, chewing open-mouthed and making little pained sounds where the meat was still hot.

 

They were the only two things Will Graham had left in the world. It sounded so childish.

 

Christ, he was so hungry.

 

He grasped Abigail's warm hand, and brought it to his mouth, and kissed the back of it. And then he took her fingers, one at a time, between his lips, and sucked away the grease. He tried to taste her underneath, and then he did not bother to try.

 

They all ate their fill together; wrapped up the rest of the cooked meat together; buried the bones, all three of them together.

 


	3. Act III

 

The White House was surrounded by a moat of infected.

 

The pit was dug deep and the bodies piled ten or more high. They had smelt it for miles, a herbaceous, compost smell that surrounded the city like a wet aura. They were not burnt, but left to rot, and not all of them were fully dead. A few around the bottom of the pit scratching at the mud and suckling the air, too much weight upon them to ever get free.

 

Will found it a distasteful warning. The infected had no notion of fear, and the threat of purgatory seemed both crass and useless.

 

"It's not a warning to them," Abigail said quietly. "It's a welcome for us."

 

"What?"

 

"Of course," Hannibal agreed. "A typically American display of strength and fortitude, I'd say. Fitting for your mighty nation's capital."

 

He had slicked back his hair with a little water from their bottles, used his thumb to rub a smudge of dirt from the stub of Abigail's missing ear. He pulled her hair across it, straightened Will's jacket and collar too. Primped and primed them for the coming company.

 

It was still and quiet, on the outside. The grounds were overgrown, the color of illness, and the pit stretched in fits and starts along the gated entrance. The façade of the great House was not as pristine as it had once been – as Will remembered from school books and movies – but it was imposing enough, even off-white. A piece of history in a world that had no means to make its own anymore.

 

Will thought perhaps, on approaching it, he would feel as though his muscles could finally, achingly, stretch out, and the gas trapped between his bones would pop and crackle, and he would stand upright at last. But he found he had never been slouching. He had walked tall, all the way from Maryland to Washington DC, between Hannibal and Abigail.

 

It was almost a disappointment, to fathom it here on the cusp of civilization. To realize he had been human all along.

 

"There are snipers," Abigail murmured as they walked carefully towards the House. She did not look up, and none of them stopped. "Second floor, third window on the right and first on the left."

 

Will trusted nothing. He never much had. At least the infected had a single-mindedness that made them easier to read. He had been away from regular people for so long that he didn't know how to call their shots anymore.

 

He put his hand on his gun, and Hannibal tsked him sharply.

 

Instead, still walking, Hannibal raised his hands, his palms up and open, his gaze unwavering in the face of the rifle sights trained on him. He spoke clearly and calmly, like a man talking someone down from the edge of a bridge. He knew, certainly, what he was doing.

 

"My name is Dr. Fell," he said. "This is my partner, William, and our ward, Abigail."

 

Will felt an unexpected jolt, as though someone had bound his ribs up with rope and tugged upon it hard. He felt it once and then it was gone. He didn't interrupt.

 

"We've come from Baltimore, Maryland. We believe we can be of some assistance to your commune. I trained at Descartes and John Hopkins, and I can provide medical care. My companions are both well-versed in firearms, and William is a self-taught mechanic. I also have some modest skills in the kitchen," he added, with no trace of irony. "We will be no burden, I can assure you."

 

There was a pause as long as a lifetime. Will wanted to seek out Abigail's hand. She was cold and still beside him, and Will sensed an absolute trust in Hannibal that sprung from her like perfume. Hannibal had saved her from her father, from Will, from a society that kept her at arm's length, preferred to examine the quirks of her murderess mind rather than try to understand it. She could disagree with him, argue with him, be hurt by him, but she could not distrust him.

 

It made Will jealous. He grabbed her by the wrist. Worried too late that the sudden movement was unwise.

 

Signals crossed paths along the front of the White House. Trigger fingers relaxed. A swift wave and a shout for them to approach.

 

Abigail wriggled her arm until she could clasp Will's hand properly. Her palm was sweating. It soothed him somehow. Hannibal, too, offered his arm, and Will's hesitation in taking it was brief enough that only the three of them noticed it.

 

*

 

Their welcome was prim, not warm.

 

Will was instantly exhausted by the glut of company. He had never at the best of times liked crowded spaces, and there was constant traffic, men and women walking the crisp corridors with and without purpose, children running and shouted after to slow down, walkie-talkies blaring static and statistics from every third person's belthooks or back pocket. The noise bored into his head and he shied away from every accidental bump, every wary glance. He veered close to Abigail, felt safe in the scent of her; worried in the back of his mind that he could no longer recognize what blood smelt like on her skin.

 

Their hosts had surely taken in worse.

 

The first thing they were given was food. Seated in a corner of the heaving Navy mess, a kindly, ageing man who was likely younger than he looked served them simple bowls of stew and flatbread. Though the vegetables were the same as Will's own canned junk, warmed through and even slightly seasoned they tasted like a meal fit for kings. Abigail ate as though she were ravenous, and it dawned on Will that they were expected to be. He shared a look with her, and followed suit.

 

Hannibal raised his hand politely to the bowl placed in front of him. "Even in these difficult times," he said, with a softness that was meant to placate, "I have always been careful about what I put in my body."

 

They had buried the last of their own food a mile or two outside DC, Abigail digging a two-foot hole with the butt of her rifle to try and cover the smell. Hannibal had been purse-lipped and disapproving. "What do you expect to do?" Will had asked him, half terse and half curious. "Just carry on like always?"

 

"I don't see why not," Hannibal had told him calmly. "Fear makes people rude, Will, and there is no dearth of fear in people's lives now."

 

He now asked warmly if he might peruse the kitchen, meet the chef. His mild manner made him seem so harmless. Abigail rubbed her ankle against Will's under the table, not a warning but reassurance that Hannibal knew what he was doing. Will wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of anything, wasn't sure why they were here. Change, he supposed, adaptation, but hadn't he worn enough disguises in his lifetime?

 

He wasn't sure, least of all, how they'd feign normality.

 

They were assigned quarters, told the regimens, given a list of names and locations to contact in case they needed anything, a stack of hand-scrawled paper forms to fill out. Red tape even in the apocalypse. A soldierly young woman took Hannibal aside, spoke to him in low tones about his profession, whether he'd be willing to take patients. "Lot of people to help," she murmured. "Lot of people seen things ain't nobody should see."

 

Hannibal's hand on her shoulder was so calming. Will still didn't know how he did it, how the years behind bars hadn't stripped away the veneer of civilization he painted himself with daily. It would have been impressive, if it weren't so horrifying to behold.

 

"My companions and I will do everything we can to help."

 

She nodded, glanced at the three of them. Will couldn't help but wonder what she saw. Three people. Just three people. No shadows. No monsters.

 

And then she straightened up, nodded a near-salute, stamped her heels together. "Welcome home, Dr. Fell," she said. As if they were soldiers, returning from a grand and glorious battle.

 

Will had started to feel like he was losing the war, and he didn't know why.

 

*

 

He dreamt about Garrett Jacob Hobbs.

 

He dreamt of interstate travel on bare train carriages, with Abigail sitting opposite him, touching her hair and laughing at his jokes; and Garrett Jacob Hobbs three rows down, watching them. Turning a hunting knife between his palms. Nobody else in the carriage, nobody else to see Abigail brush her ankle against Will's under the seats in front of them, nobody else to see Garrett Jacob Hobbs hand her the knife.

 

He dreamt of being bled in a room made of timber and horns.

 

He dreamt of sitting across from Garrett Jacob Hobbs in an extravagant office, a two-tiered library with floor-to-ceiling windows and a framed etching of the Wound Man upon the wall. He told Hobbs all his secrets. Abigail, beside him, noted them down.

 

Daintily, she ate her notebook, page by page.

 

He dreamt of Garrett Jacob Hobbs serving him great lumps of bloody flesh, no attempt at disguise, a skinned cut of thigh cauterized at the ends and drooling with maroon gravy. Abigail and her father tucked in greedily. Will looked down at his plate. A single severed ear.

 

He dreamt of Garrett Jacob Hobbs pushing a military knife through the soft meat of his face, straddling his chest and decomposing rapidly. Molly shot him. He did not fall back. She lowered her gun as though she had felled him. Abigail, behind him, pushed her fingers between the back of Garrett Jacob Hobbs' ribs and pulled out the bloody bullet from the cavity of his heart.

 

Will woke up ranting and sweating and alone. Salt water ran in streaming rivulets down his neck and arms and thighs, and the thin mattress below him was a mess. The high, unfamiliar ceiling startled him, and it took him a moment to realize he was not sinking.

 

Garrett Jacob Hobbs was dead, and his daughter was colluding across the room with the man who framed Will for her murder.

 

They were whispering in hushed tones, mouths close. Hannibal did not look at him, but raised a hand slightly to show all at once that Will was acknowledged, that he was safe, and that he was not invited into this discussion. Will curled back into bed, wrapping his damp arms around himself. They had plotted his downfall while Will had been losing his mind; had sent love notes to each other across Europe while he rotted in the asylum. He had no sane reason to believe his presence in their lives would change that.

 

DC was making him petty.

 

There were perhaps six hundred people living in the White House now, a thirty-seventy split between military personnel and civilians. Not that there wasn't room for more, but after the early-days throng of families and refugees arriving in droves, people had simply stopped coming. There were enough places to be alone if Will searched for them, but anti-social behavior was frowned upon in the last bastion of humanity.

 

Nobody seemed to know what to call it: a haven, an icon, a fortress. Will asked a patrolling soldier – young; they were all young, because the men and women with more than one tour under their belts were the first line of defense when the infection broke out and all the government could do was throw bodies at it – he asked if there had ever been a breach.

 

Once, he was told. Once, on a changeover in shifts, in the early days. They'd had to burn down the entire Rose Garden to contain it. People who'd walked for miles and miles to get somewhere safe lost to the infection they had worked so hard to escape.

 

Now they staggered the changeover.

 

Everything was stable and sterilized. A young utopia, everyone working together to survive, warring political ideals and the big questions about the future of humanity a few years off yet. No president that ever slept between those great white walls could have dreamt of so much harmony.

 

Will Graham found himself listless. He had always appreciated the stability of routine – feeding time with the dogs, his step-by-step prep work for lectures and classes, Molly's pleasant consistency in wanting to make love nightly. Even in Baltimore, there had been patrols, shifts, prompt mealtimes, alternating sets of familiar limbs to curl up in each night. They had come to DC for more of the same, hadn't they? A stable life.

 

Perhaps for a murderer it stank too much of prison.

 

There was a shooting range down below the residential levels where Will kept sharp. Abigail joined him the first few times, but didn't take up arms. Just watched Will curiously, examining his angles. She corrected his stance on one of the long-range guns, but he asked her not to do that because it reminded him of Katz.

 

She let him be after that.

 

"She is not easily offended," Hannibal assured him, to soothe his constant worries. "She simply wanted to know how you looked when you shot her father."

 

There was an eclectic library in the Green Room, the collected tastes of every resident: Dr. Seuss and bedtime stories, golden-haired women languishing on the covers of dog-eared romances, curt scientific textbooks, duplicate copies of military handbooks, and as much history as anyone could want to devour on the Founding Fathers. Even Hannibal's carefully stolen tomes were here. If Will put his nose to the spines, he could still smell the medicinal tang of the Baltimore State Hospital.

 

He tried to remember long-languishing essays hidden in the recesses of his mind, paper copies burnt as kindling in the Florida Keys when firewood was low. Rewrote them painstakingly by hand, citing references nobody would ever be able to check.

 

He felt like a crowd craning its neck to glimpse a crime scene, constantly shuffled along and told: nothing to see here. Nothing to see here.

 

Hannibal, meanwhile, was everything to everyone. The kindly king, the healer, the entertainer; he had the House in his thrall, swapping his role in the court nightly.

 

There was no sous chef here, more like mess hall cooks and lunch-ladies, their station suddenly elevated. But Hannibal shook every hand with old-world respect and upper-class grace, inviting himself on tours of the kitchens and pantries. There was food enough here for months. Bomb shelters from the sixties stacked out with cans from floor to ceiling, frozen meat and vegetables in great underground lockers, meant to feed the President, his family, and his cast of thousands. There were fresh rarities being grown in the gardens and greenhouses too, the soil out behind the south portico tilled painstakingly by hand and planted with wheat that might be enough, in a year or two, for fifty-odd loaves of flatbread. It was more than most of the Western world could dream of, now.

 

Hannibal surveyed it all without emotion. Machinating.

 

Abigail was a mystery too. She went missing for great stretches of the day, exploratory as a cat in new territory. Sometimes she would sit at Hannibal's side for his great dinners in the Oval Office: a select audience of unremarkable people that changed nightly, dazzled by the food Hannibal spread, once he was allowed to play with his new compatriots in the kitchens, and by the stage show he put on. Abigail was his leading lady; Will's part was smaller, non-speaking. Hannibal would often rub the back of Will's hand slowly with his thumb, upon the tabletop. It felt, always, shockingly genuine.

 

Once, Abigail slid the ball of her foot up Will's thigh under the dinner table. He thought about going back to the room with her and fucking her. The uncracked façade of Hannibal's perfect cover story hadn't exactly left room for such pastimes.

 

But she disappeared after dinner. Will had no right to follow her.

 

He wrote his meaningless essays, politely avoided questions from his neighbors about what his life was like when the world was real. Ate Hannibal's food, the unfamiliarity of animal meat making him chew heavily, deliberately. Showered late in the communal bathrooms and rubbed himself off against the cream tiles. The human condition was alive and well in this haven, and Will had seen newly pregnant bellies in the weeks since they had arrived; had seen young men flirt with Abigail sweetly in public corridors. Not-so-young men as well.

 

They were told an influx of travelers had made contact from east of Nashville and were on their way, and extra cot beds were brought into their room by apologetic volunteers. Abigail, in preparation, stopped letting Will touch the nape of her neck even when they were alone.

 

Will had never liked people enough to be particularly spiteful. He was too insular, too aware of the damage people did to themselves to want to multiply it. He had thought some, over the years, of killing Hannibal, and dreamt of his hands loose on Abigail's neck, but he saw that more as a sign that he cared too much. Whyever would he want to hurt people he didn't care about?

 

Will followed Abigail one night. Clearly she knew he was there; she was a hunter, and a few scant weeks of civilization and normality weren't distraction enough to waylay her instincts. He didn't make the effort to stalk her, just walked ten paces or so behind her. She had never learnt to walk in heels as a teenager, and wore running shoes now, plucked from a community stockpile – though she kept her trudging boots tucked in the corner of their room – so she padded quietly, mammalian, rather than clacking down the hall.

 

Molly never wore heels. Terrible for damp sand, terrible for lakeside fishing. Wore pumps when they went out to dinner with friends; or rather, Will saw her wearing pumps as she kissed him goodbye.

 

Abigail would have done the same. Worn pumps and not stayed in with him. That would have been okay. The fear of waiting for someone to return made him frantic in bed.

 

He followed her down to the lower levels, past the storerooms and ammunitions stock. There was a better-than-makeshift hospital down here that he knew Hannibal volunteered at when he needed to reinforce his benevolence. He wasn't here tonight, but Abigail turned in through the doors anyway. Greeted a few bedridden young women like old friends. Ordinary sorts of bumps and bruises, illnesses blanket-treated with antibiotics or bed rest. No infection here.

 

Will watched Abigail chat brightly with a girl her own age, and hated himself. Hated himself for ever invading her youth.

 

As though he alone had ruined her.

 

*

 

He slept too much and forgot too little.

 

"Will," Hannibal said, rousing him. "We have been through much together, have we not?"

 

"You could say."

 

"I have no doubt you consider me an ally now, but after all these years, I am still your doctor," Hannibal said, both soft and firm, like a padded cell. Will laughed at him, then swallowed it like bitter lemonade. Strangely, Hannibal smiled. "You were my most favored patient," he told Will, laying a hand on his shoulder.

 

Will leant into the touch like he always had. He was fully clothed in bed, having lain down in a fit of malaise, and part of him wanted to pull Hannibal down beside him, curl around him like the lovers they were supposed to be; like the snake and the mongoose, eternally circling one another until one made the first strike.

 

He didn't. Let Hannibal's palm linger on the bone of his shoulder. Hannibal and Abigail both were starting to fill out again; Will was still slight, and supposed he seemed vulnerable.

 

"I have a free appointment tomorrow evening," Hannibal informed him.

 

"A chink in your popularity?"

 

"Don't be trite, William. Take the leaf I'm offering."

 

Will swallowed. He had seen no therapist in the long interim between his last session with Hannibal and the end of the world. Molly had soaked up some of his sadness like a sponge, absorbed it, wrung it out elsewhere when she was full of it; but she was always a receptacle, nothing more, and Will was a deep and echoing well.

 

"Okay," he murmured.

 

"Good," Hannibal said, settled. His hand was still on Will's shoulder, and he leant down and softly kissed the back of Will's bared neck. There was nobody here to vet them. But he did it anyway.

 

Will almost thanked him.

 

*

 

A man like Will could never shake the face of death. It was there in the dull background of every half-seen mirror, every Rorschach blot, in the dancing stars when he closed his eyes before sleep. He had thought, dimly, in the early days of the infection, that he might reach a limit. That the world would become so oversaturated with death that it ceased to affect him anymore.

 

It seemed like such a naïve thought now.

 

The first funeral came a month into their extended stay. That was the most bizarre thing about it, the old sense of mournful ceremony. People crying out of solidarity more than loss. There was no time for open caskets here, and the body was burnt within hours, but the remembrance, the choral sobbing, went on for a day or two.

 

Will sat at the back, avoiding the palpable unhappiness. He was crouching under the weight of his own, and didn't need other people's adding to the strain.

 

Hannibal had called the time of death.

 

Abigail said a few words. One of the young women she had befriended in the hospital wing. There were people who knew her better, of course, but those people were long since dead.

 

There was a strange and familiar look in Abigail's eye. Her hair was brushed and straight, her feet lined up together, her deft hands on the makeshift pulpit, its presidential seal crudely pulled down. She looked—pretty. She looked elemental. As though the closeness of death had revived her somehow. The thought didn't disgust Will.

 

Jesus, he wanted her very badly. He always did, didn't he? The pheromones, the draw of her living body among so many corpses.

 

She talked daintily, with the same conviction she had denying her own father to Jack Crawford.

 

Abigail caught Will's eye as she stepped back down to polite, pitiful applause. She was glowing, in the labyrinth of her iris. Not a deer caught in headlights, but a stag, absorbing, reflecting, magnanimous.

 

She couldn't have grown taller in her absence. But standing next to Hannibal in a crowd of people Will couldn't muster up a single ounce of care for, she seemed like his equal.

 

He wished desperately that he could stand with them. He hadn't yet managed it; not quite in Baltimore, and certainly not here. A step or two perpetually below.

 

Abigail slipped under his bedsheets that night, buried her face in his shoulder as though she could smell the places where Hannibal so often put a soothing hand on him. He was wearing someone else's old sweater and she got a hand under it, under his shirt. It felt like she could slide that warm hand right through his skin and wrap it around his bloody heart.

 

"Abigail," Will murmured, rolling over and tucking his legs up to tangle together with hers. Both of them like balls of twine, rough-edged.

 

"I know you're unhappy," she whispered, "but just wait a little longer. Please?"

 

"Of course," he managed, not knowing what he'd agreed to.

 

They fucked awkwardly beneath the sheets, mostly dressed, spooned around each other like quotation marks, canting their hips in a mirrored, unfrantic rhythm. Will remembered jerking off once in the bath, thinking about her. So long before everything; before America had become a wasteland, before Abigail had died, before Hannibal had betrayed them all. He had thought about her slim breasts, and Hannibal's big hands, and how similarly toned their skin was, one smooth and one maturely aged. He'd come in the bathwater with a muffled groan, and staggered out while he was still loose-limbed and heady, feeling sick.

 

He was over all that now. Thrust up, pulled her back onto him. She helped, wriggling down, wanting every inch of him she could take. Her pleated skirt – someone else's, from some time when things mattered and people cared – bunched between their bodies, getting creased. It wasn't important. Abigail was so warm, and so alive.

 

"I should—" Will gasped, quiet, feeling tight all over. Like twine again, wrapped around Abigail's whole body, leaving marks.

 

"Stay, stay here," she murmured, almost keening, and so he did. Jerked his hips twice more into the heat of her and came right there.

 

Will put his fingers between her thighs a little while after and felt grotesque for just a split-second. "It's okay," she reassured him, pulling her mussed hair over her shoulder and settling into the pillow next to him. "Hannibal's done it too."

 

It calmed him to know it. He pushed his finger up to where she was still wet and sensitive, listened to her small and contented murmur.

 

It was almost midnight when Hannibal returned to the room. He told them the Nashville company had finally arrived, shaken and rain-soaked and fearing that all men could become monsters.

 

"It's all right," Will muttered, echoing Abigail's uncanny calm. "It's all right. We're just a family. We're family."

 

They slept in the one bed, shirts off and bare arms tangled, Abigail between them like a soft, breathing tether. There wasn't enough room in the bed for nightmares as well.

 

*

 

Will woke up to the salty smell of breakfast. The nostalgia of it was so strong that he could smell a hundred other things in amongst the scent: damp dogs, crisp snow, the coast, Molly's shampoo, old blood, a gutted deer, Abigail's perfume – chosen by her father – and the unplaceable scent of Hannibal's Maryland office. Woody, but ancient wood, nothing like the freshness of new cabinets or recently printed books. More pagan, somehow.

 

He breathed in deeply. It was just eggs and onion and sausage.

 

They lacked the luxury of a dining table in their room, so Will rolled over, fumbled for a T-shirt and pulled it on, shivering out of reflex more than cold. His muscles felt stiff from a night in a cramped bed, but there was a vague satisfaction to the ache; something post-coital.

 

Abigail and Hannibal's similar smiles greeted him, and they brought him over a plate and sat cross-legged on the bed like children at Christmas. Hannibal laughed at himself, straightened up and let his legs dangle over the side. It should've been bizarre. It should've been awful and bizarre and unfathomable, a quaint breakfast in the company of murderers, with a world on fire half a mile outside their tiny bedroom window.

 

On some level, Will knew before he put his fork to his mouth. The smell was too recognizable.

 

Abigail watched him like he was a calf suckling for the first time. Motherly nerves and the distance of scientific observation, even as she leant bodily towards him. Hannibal was better at hiding it. Straight-backed, tucking into his warm breakfast.

 

It felt like so many years ago that Hannibal had first brought him breakfast in a dank hotel room in Minnesota. Back when Abigail was a hypothetical, and Will knew no better than to eat what was graciously put in front of him.

 

"Fuck," Will muttered. Chewed; swallowed. "—Fuck. I have to—"

 

He staggered up off the bed. Dimly noticed Hannibal putting a stern hand on Abigail, treating her so much the same as he did Will, both a catalyst and a buoy, stepping in to prompt lines when Will and Abigail went off-script. He let Will leave, though. Let him feel as though the conclusions might not be entirely inevitable.

 

Hannibal was made of red blood cells and white lies.

 

Will went to the hospital wing. It was early enough that he only had to feign passive nods at a few people on his way down. At least six feet under, down here; already prepared.

 

The sterile tang. The white walls. They could've been in any hospital in the country. Hannibal had called it, hadn't he, when she had died? Hannibal had offered, low and careful, to perform a perfunctory autopsy. Will couldn't remember what bullshit explanation he'd given them all.

 

He slipped back into the old focus so damn easily. Like the rhythmic swing of a hypnotist's pendulum, two, three seconds and he was there, the vivid past, oversaturated and hyper-real. He was older than when he had last done this, older and more hesitant, and he stood planted, let the scene unfold around him.

 

A girl – no, no, a young woman. Twenty-two. Maybe. Younger than Abigail. Arrived recently, with a twisted ankle and an unpretty grimace when she walked. Running from the infected, she'd told Abigail, slipped on a wet stone. Some previous unfortunate a stark prophecy of what could become of her if she didn't keep running.

 

Jeez, that's brave, Abigail would have told her. Holding her hand like long-lost friends. That's so brave of you.

 

Both of them liars, but Abigail had learnt from better men. Christ. She wasn't forming alliances down here, was she?

 

The young woman had twisted her ankle kicking a stray cat against the roadside rubble. The poor thing nosing in her rucksack for crumbs and comfort. She'd kicked out and lost her footing.

 

The cat had yelped and fled, and she had ended up here, touched by the dark-haired harbinger. A weary animal doesn't expect a boot to the stomach after a long journey. A young woman doesn't expect the knife in return for her blithe friendship.

 

A tentative hand on Will's arm pulled him bodily back into the here and now, gasping like he'd been underwater. Maybe they called him sir or mister. Maybe they asked him if he was okay. People had asked him that all his adult life and it was always the most innocuous question he'd had to deflect.

 

He threw up graphically in the nearest bathroom, and immediately felt lighter for it. Emptier. He expected the space in his stomach to fill up with slow, trickling anger, but it didn't come. Just a vacant hole where his morality was, maybe, once upon a time.

 

That was how they talked about fairy tales, wasn't it? Myths and legends like right and wrong.

 

Hannibal still had a smile to greet him with, when he found his way back to the room. Abigail was more concerned, pulling his head into her lap and letting him curl against her thigh. She pressed a hard kiss to his forehead, and it made him realize how badly he'd sweated through his rough hair.

 

"Your breakfast is cold," Hannibal said mildly, "but it's still perfectly edible."

 

"Give him a minute," Abigail snapped, but Will shook his head. Sat up and motioned for the plate.

 

They both watched him shovel down mouthful after mouthful.

 

He ate every goddamn scrap of it, and it was delicious.

 

"Who decided she deserved this?" he asked nobody in particular. "Who passed judgment that she was – what, too rude? Too crass? Uncouth?"

 

"We all of us have limited choice nowadays," Hannibal told him. If he were a less poised man, he would have shrugged. And then he said suddenly, firmly: "I am not obtuse, William. Your regrets in this place have been neither quiet nor subtle, and I've known you intimately for a good many years."

 

"We didn't want you to get caught up in it," Abigail explained, her hand soothing on Will's thigh. "Wanted to make it, you know, your choice."

 

"I already chose," Will said, his voice shaking something awful. "I already chose you two. Fuck, I could've had my pick of cannibals, you know?" He almost laughed at the clarity of it. "Half the fucking world's eating itself, and I came to you."

 

"We did not mean to doubt," Hannibal said, softer now. "Only to make sure."

 

"I thought we'd be okay too," Abigail whispered, a rare admission, her voice very close and oddly open. "I thought we could pretend to fit in."

 

Will wished with every fiber of his nervous system that he could be angry. But he'd not had the energy in him for years. Just a hollow, repeated thud where there should have been screaming. Constantly perched under his chin; he never did manage to let it out.

 

Abigail had made a jagged slit in her thin mattress and had been storing up their rations for weeks. Will figured his useless essays would do as kindling if nothing else, and stuffed them into his rucksack. They had only pickpocketed ammo, a bow and arrow that Abigail had made in a petty self-defense class, and a picture of the east coast torn out of a 1960s road map.

 

Hannibal even held one of his soirées the night before they left. Served the willing guests their own kin. He'd miss it, but Will suspected there was some figurative spotlight in the open sky that followed Hannibal wherever he went; got lost along the way sometimes, but always caught up.

 

They left in the early hours. Abigail stuck a dinner knife in the spines of two guards, and wiped their mingled blood on the presidential lawn. Everyone would know what they'd done by morning, and everyone would weep at the ugliness of humanity they thought had been left on the wayside, butted aside by ravenous mouths and thoughtless minds.

 

Will felt okay. Will felt honestly okay.

 

His feet were back on the path he knew, even if he couldn't see the gravel underfoot for all the shadows.

 


	4. Act IV

 

Will Graham went on a hiking trip, one time when such things were options, at Springer Mountain with his wife Molly and Molly's young son. The boy was not much of a talker, and reminded Will of himself at that inaccessible age, but that never made it easier to communicate. Will had never found someone to break through his own shell, had no successes to mimic. So the boy simply wheezed through the cold climb, exhausted and uncomplaining. He'd grabbed his mother's hand two hours into the trek.

 

"Will," Molly'd said, with the same voice she used when she was going out with the girls and there would be no question. "We gotta stop."

 

"It'll be good for him," Will had replied, grimacing at his own words; the words of his father, really. "It's just the thin air up here."

 

"I'm heading back down," Molly had told him. She was more one for statements than questions. She'd taken off her backpack, left it for Will to heft, and put her little boy on her back instead, his crooked, tan knees threaded through the bend in her elbows.

 

Will had considered going on up to where they'd planned to make camp, settling down and eating some, maybe lighting a little fire when the sun went down and sleeping cold under the stars.

 

He had not thought, even at the time, that this was the choice a normal husband would take.

 

Hadn't he promised to take Abigail hiking once? It seemed like a laughable recollection.

 

Yet here they all were.

 

Whenever they walked through suburbs lined with decomposing bodies, Abigail trotted backwards, a few steps ahead of Will, so that he could look at her face instead of the corpses. "He can't stand it either," she said, nodding towards Hannibal's disgruntled expression, laughter somehow hiding in her voice.

 

"It's the savagery I detest. What on earth is the point of a messy death?" Hannibal chided, and Abigail let her laughter out.

 

Will smiled. Switched his rifle over to his left shoulder, and smiled at their jokes about the end of the world.

 

*

 

They made slow progress back to Maryland. Everywhere was quiet and still, like tattered flags in a low wind: they'd missed much of America ripping itself apart holed up in Washington DC. They simply walked through kicked-in front doors now, politely raided kitchen closets for leftovers and ammunition. If Hannibal found a book that piqued his interest, they might stay for an hour or two, lounging on chewed-up sofas or dining sets that hadn't been chopped up for firewood, listening to him read aloud. One apartment, four stories above a burnt-out diner with only ashes to offer them for sustenance, had a still-working generator hooked up to a television set, and Abigail made a show of picking out a movie, even though most of the discs were cracked and shattered on the wooden floor. She put on _Amadeus_ for them all to watch, her head in Will's lap and her feet resting on Hannibal's knees.

 

The power gave up an hour in. Hannibal finished the story for them. Dead men and legends.

 

"I never did this," Will muttered, when it was quiet. Abigail was asleep, his legs a good enough pillow. They'd have to rouse her soon. Move on to more places with nothing left but fragments of old lives. "With Molly. With anyone. We didn't bother with a TV, not when we had the ocean in our back yard."

 

"You miss her?"

 

"Is it callous to say no? I think about her a lot. I don't know if I miss her."

 

"Selfishness is a natural instinct," Hannibal said, unmoved. "And self-hatred is an absurdly man-made construct."

 

 "You've never much cared for other people, have you?" Will asked dryly.

 

"What a stupid thing to say, William," Hannibal told him. He said it very mildly, and Will didn't entirely know how to respond.

 

*

 

Onwards to nowhere.

 

They were resourceful. Abigail took down a triad of infected with her bow, improving all the time. She swore when her arrows snapped, and they walked slower than ever through the woodland, scouting out strong wood and dry patches to sit and carve primitive arrows. Will's knife was getting blunt. At the next town, Hannibal sought out a restaurant with empty shelves and emptier refrigerators, but with a hand-cranked knife-sharpener that nobody had been smart enough to steal.

 

Will cleaned pebbles on his shirt to suckle on when they got low on water.

 

All those survival tips that had seemed useless when he'd been taught them in the FBI Academy. Supposed to be used in dire circumstances, when lost or abducted.

 

"Aren't you both?" Abigail said honestly, when he noted it aloud.

 

"Maybe," Will muttered.

 

They slept in placid rows of empty houses, inhabitants fled or dead or forcibly removed by men before them. Cupboards already gutted. Prescription pill bottles empty in bathroom cabinets. Blankets gone, but winter quilts mostly intact, too heavy to travel light with. There was something grossly trite in the way they curled around each other at night, Hannibal kissing lips and foreheads goodnight, but Will couldn't bring himself to be repelled by it; by any of it.

 

They still fucked when they had the energy.

 

One night found them in bunk beds, Hannibal above, Will and Abigail below, and she cuddled into his warmth like the dogs used to when his boiler in Wolf Trap kicked the bucket.

 

"If I'd had a sister, maybe we'd have slept like this," she mused quietly, secretly.

 

"I wouldn't know," Will mumbled, unhappy that he could not give her a better answer; the answer her father would.

 

"If I'd had a sister," Abigail said, looking at his bottom lip, "maybe my dad would've killed girls that looked like her instead of me."

 

"Abigail," Hannibal called from above, sternly. "Don't be morbid."

 

It made her laugh, the kind of long-held-in laughter that ends up in spittle and shut eyes; and it infected Will. His hands around her shaking chest, her open mouth warm against his neck, and he laughed too at the idiocy of it all. It was the first time, in all the years he'd known her – known her, remembered her, mourned her, and known her again – that they'd shared something so blithe.

 

That morning, an infected was shuffling around the living room downstairs, drooling acridly on paisley cushions. Abigail woke Will, hushed him, and brought him to crouch with her at the top of the staircase. The angles her limbs made as she loaded her bow were beautiful in the same way a geometrical equation was: unapproachable, the answer to her riddle visible only to a chosen few.

 

She left her bow slack. "Want to see me do it close up?" she whispered.

 

"Why?"

 

"Because it's better that way," she answered simply. "Didn't it make you feel good, being so close to my dad?"

 

Will told her not to risk it. She shrugged, disappointed, and aimed low.

 

As the infected below them burbled and thrashed, pinned against the far wall, Will leant over and kissed the pale stretch of Abigail's collarbone, just below her scar. She rocked into it. They were both so much quicker to forgive, these days.

 

The infected slowed, draining out. Stilled.

 

Hannibal did not join them in their futile search for a meager breakfast. Instead, he wrapped a burgundy scarf around his mouth and nose, rolled up his sleeves, and tugged the arrow out of the monster's chest. Cleaned it, returned it to Abigail.

 

"Your knife, please, Will," he asked politely.

 

It took him nearly an hour to gut the infected. There was no reason to do it, no chance of saving the meat now. But he did it all the same, carefully and methodically, as though Hannibal were remembering the steps of a dance learnt long ago. Keeping himself sharp.

 

Will watched the thing with a total disconnect. He could tell nothing about the life of the man who came before the monster, not from this. All he could read was the absolute calm radiating from Hannibal. Flashes of his time as a doctor. Memories that weren't Will's own from a grand medical school in old France, from surgeries, from morgues; from kitchens.

 

Will felt a deep sense of pride that he didn't look away, not once in the entire performance.

 

Hannibal sat for a long time with his hands dirty, tinted greenish-brown from the thick, congealing blood. Eventually the smell became overpowering. Will and Abigail both helped him clean off in the bathtub, water spitting from the faucet intermittently.

 

"Do you feel better now?" Abigail asked, her smile small and genuine.

 

Hannibal didn't answer, but smiled back thinly.

 

It was easy to forget that Hannibal was human sometimes, Will supposed, a little ashamed. He'd spent five years convincing himself that the scraps of humanity left inside Hannibal once upon a time were long since consumed. It had always felt like something of a lie, but then, Will had lied to himself about so many things along the way.

 

No need for it now. No need anymore.

 

Maybe Hannibal, never ashamed, never in doubt, and never uncertain of anything, least of all his own convictions, was always the most human of them all.

 

They had passed through Baltimore again, two weeks back. Meandered slowly towards Hannibal's old house, hope making Will's feet heavy.

 

It had turned out to be a rotten eggshell, split open, its insides oozing onto the sidewalk. One half was caved in almost entirely, the right side, a smaller mirror image of the Baltimore Hospital. Abigail had put her hand on Hannibal's elbow, and both of them looked small among the ruins. Will had wondered how wrecked his perception had become, after everything that'd happened, or whether people weren't such fixed features after all.

 

The house had never been sold, after his incarceration – too tainted even for purveyors of the macabre. His kitchens had already been emptied by the Feds, but everything else was fair game in the years after. Hannibal's dining room was intact but looted, his masterful _Leda and the Swan_ askew upon the wall, left by a race of men who no longer cared for art or its ilk. His books were merely spines now, paper ripped out for kindling.

 

Hannibal had quietly mourned.

 

"Did you think you'd be able to just – come back here? Slide back into it like an old slipper?" Will knew he was indelicate. Emotions made him blunt. Hannibal had never chastised him for it.

 

"No, Will," Hannibal had replied wearily. He had met Will's gaze, and Will broke the link first.

 

"We should go to the coast," Abigail had ventured, quiet and still. "The Cape, maybe." People had run inland, to farms and factories. Anyone who had gone to water had long since sailed. The affluent had gone first of all.

 

"Yes," Hannibal had sighed, straightening himself. It was strange, Will had realized, to see him mourn a lost life. Not a person, never enough care for a living thing, but the fineries of routine, the detail of a disguise built up so carefully over so many years. The world could go to shit, but as long as Hannibal had what he needed, that was all it took to keep him buoyant.

 

Will tried not to wonder what sort of pedestal that placed him and Abigail on. Things were overwhelming enough as it was.

 

So they went towards Cape May.

 

It was a dull, drudging walk. They held hands, the three of them, for much of the way. Why not? What had three murderers to hide in this place?

 

The trees were flourishing, with no intervention. Shoots bursting through cracks in the road, vines already creeping like clamps around abandoned cars. They passed over vast bodies of water, sturdy bridges and calm waves, and Will wondered idly what the fishing was like these days. Risky, he suspected. Birds overhead, pecking and cawing viciously at each other; the faint spores of the infection caught in high, gusting currents, latching onto beaks and black eyes. Plant life had taken on a curiously human drive, devouring everything in its path simply for the sake of expansion.

 

"I have nothing but respect for it," Hannibal said. His voice was as thin as his body; still commanding, though.

 

"You would," Abigail scoffed, hunger bringing out her youth. But she was smiling, her arms locked with both Hannibal and Will. Silently, Will agreed with her sass: psychopaths functioned either with jealousy for their kind, or a sort of envious respect.

 

They slowed as they neared the Cape. They'd passed perhaps three or four struggling travelers on the road since DC, a wide berth between them. One man, decked out in a dirty suit and pulling a trundling, wheeled carry case, made the mistake of eye contact with Abigail.

 

Hannibal and Will waited at the side of the road while she stalked him. "Let her have her fun," Hannibal said mildly, but, much to his surprise, Will felt no disdain. He didn't have the energy to analyze that. He never much liked picking apart his own thoughts.

 

They built a fire and ate silently and ravenously.

 

*

 

It happened on the far end of the North Delsea bridge, a few hours out from the Cape.

 

Will, absurdly, thought in the mess of it all that Hannibal's reputation had preceded him all the way out here, all these years later. But surely, by now, it wasn't only his.

 

They'd crossed the goddamn Delaware Memorial without incident. It seemed stupid that a junk little bridge like this would have an armed guard, but men had their own reasons for their ways, and guns to make dissenters agree.

 

The first shot clipped Abigail on the shoulder, just barely. The vividness of her blood, after so much murky greenish-brown from the infected, was a jolting shock. For the first time in this whole escapade, Hannibal bodily protected her, wrapping his big form around her and shielding her with his back. That way, crablike, they scuttled to the side of the bridge, pressed tight and low against the edge. Will could hear shouting, shooting, male voices. He tried to cover Abigail's wounded shoulder with his palm, just like he had cupped her neck with both hands all those years ago.

 

"It's a scratch," she whispered shakily. "How many bullets left for the rifle?"

 

"I don't—"

 

"Three," Hannibal confirmed sternly, "for two men."

 

Under the umbrella cover of his broad back, Will crawled around between them, untied Abigail's hunting rifle from her satchel, pressed it into her hands. She winced. He pulled his Smith and Wesson out of his back pocket, but it was only for show. The magazine had been empty for weeks.

 

The angle of the wall ricocheted debris over them in a prickly shower every time a bullet hit, but they weren't fighting fools. Hits were few and far between, and Will suspected they could draw this out to knives and fists. Jesus, he hadn't been in a firefight for years. He couldn't remember ever being in one in possession of all his wits. Sweating with fear in the early Academy years, half-mad hunting Hannibal's red herrings, shook up like a soda bottle when Dolarhyde stuck a knife through his cheek.

 

"Will," Abigail said sharply, clicking her tongue to hold his attention. "Use my good shoulder as a ledge." She handed him the rifle. He'd never hunted. A fisherman through and through. Even catching Hannibal, in the end, he had been bait.

 

Will breathed out steadily. Tried to wend his way into Abigail's way of thinking, into her physique. He'd seen her shoot enough to mirror it. Leant the nose of the rifle against her shoulder, as far from her ear as he could – it was the stub side, and she curtained her hair to one side to give him more clarity. He could see the clean, cauterized cut, the blunt hole in her head. He'd done that. Somehow it all came back to him.

 

"Focus," she said, more gently. She slid his knife from his belt, passed it with a flinch back to Hannibal.

 

Will couldn't see the shape of a man in his sight for a very long time. And then suddenly a blur of movement, and he pulled the trigger.

 

A thick, bloody yelp. Abigail cowered against her pain and the rifle ringing in her ears. Like a relay, Will and Hannibal switched roles and in the hurt chaos, Hannibal made a calculated sprint, covering the few yards to their foes with surprising speed. Will kissed Abigail's forehead, apologetic, gripped the rifle, and ran to cover Hannibal.

 

The man he'd shot was down entirely, bleeding out through the neck. Luck more than skill. But his companion was up and livid, pistol in one hand and a serrated dagger in the other. Will knelt to take him down, Hannibal aside to pick up the slack if he missed.

 

Like a sudden gale, it gasped out at him from the left side.

 

An unholy figure lurched into Will's periphery a split second before it latched onto him bodily. Its bones cracked as fingers found his neck, scrabbling at his dry skin, marrow shot through with chlorophyll, nails greenish and peeling. He managed a look at its face, engorged beyond all recognition, only a broken maw gaping and drizzling in amongst a mass of pus and coral.

 

Will dropped the rifle and with the safety off, it fired; well wide of any mark. A burbling yell told him Hannibal had managed to dispatch their human foe, and the infected screeched in echo, the noise only enraging it. Will got an elbow into its stomach and it doubled back, clawed at its own face as though it couldn't comprehend how pain functioned anymore, and then jumped at him before he could even catch his balance.

 

Will's hand flew up to protect his face. The infected, with all its unnatural might, clamped its broken jaw down on his palm.

 

It broke skin. It went so deep the thing's teeth almost met inside Will's fragile flesh.

 

It hurt like a goddamn linoleum knife to the gut.

 

He wasn't entirely sure what happened next. Hannibal dispatched the beast with their one remaining bullet, crunched its coralline face in with the butt of the gun just to make sure. Abigail, suddenly at Will's side, dragged him away from the spattering flesh and plant life. He couldn't stand. He could barely crawl. He didn't – he wasn't sure what—

 

"Don't move," Abigail said, and she might have been shouting, but she sounded like she was underwater. His eardrums popped and fizzled. It might've been all in his mind, desperate distraction from the pain in his hand. Two of his fingers were hanging at a terrible angle, bone bright and too visible. One of the infected's teeth was lodged in his skin, between the knuckles.

 

When Abigail came back, she had intent in her eyes and a knife in her hand. Not Will's. Taken from one of the dead men. She cleaned it on the hem of her shirt. Then she roughhoused Will until his dead hand was braced between her legs. Behind him, he could hear Hannibal ripping fabric; making strips out of the lining of his jacket, his sleeves rolled up. He still had a pocket handkerchief, which he stretched tight, crouching behind Will and teasing it between his slack jaws.

 

"Bite hard," he whispered.

 

"I would have shot you," Will babbled, "all those years ago. In Abigail's kitchen. I would have shot you, you bastard."

 

"Quite right," Hannibal said gently.

 

Abigail nodded. "I'm ready." And she pressed the knife against the back of Will's hand. All the way across.

 

*

 

Cape May was still. Almost tranquil, it seemed, but a closer glance gave away sky-blue shutters hanging from their hinges above cracked windows, overturned trash cans in overgrown back yards, empty ports, a sunken yacht with its bow sticking just above the water like a lonely island.

 

Will Graham, a man who always saw every layer whether he wanted to or not, just didn't have the energy for details.

 

They found the house so soon after their arrival. One of the few locked doors they'd come across. Hannibal and Abigail helped Will to the sofa, laid him down, rearranged his makeshift sling. Just the rest of Hannibal's jacket, holding the stump of his arm up across his chest. His torso was a mess of dried blood, and Abigail promised to find him a clean shirt, kissed his damp forehead.

 

He closed his eyes while they explored. He imagined he could hear the dreary beep of hospital machinery, the prickling of IV drips in his hand and tubes down his nose and throat. It was a familiar memory. Molly by his side, but not holding his hand, just a shadow in the white doorway. He'd wanted her closer. He'd wanted to bury his wrecked face in her hips, in her belly, but her arms were crossed and she would not speak to him from nearer than arm’s length.

 

He was murmuring aloud. "It's all right," Abigail replied, touching his ruined body. "I love you how you are."

 

She had always been a little crazy. So they all were.

 

She told him: there were two dogs cowering in the kitchen, scrabbled through a cat flap in the back door. She didn't know what breed; Will would have to tell her when he had the sense enough to look. As well, there were two corpses upstairs on the bed. Noble suicides, a hand-penned letter to an absent daughter beside them – they had saved this house for her, sniped at intruders from the upstairs window for weeks. There was a greenhouse in the garden. It was almost overflowing. Hannibal is out there, inspecting, she said. He thinks it's sustainable, she said. He's going to make soup, she said.

 

It was a goddamn miracle.

 

Jesus, but Will was tired and sore. He could feel the phantom fingers of his left hand drumming on his opposite shoulder, a nervous tic, just like whenever Abigail tucked her hair behind her missing ear. He hadn't looked at the wound in days. They needed clean dressing. He could feel it oozing, and not healing.

 

The eggshell spirals of the ceiling seemed burned onto the backs of his eyelids, and even so sluggish he could tell so many things: a retirement home, an old, devoted couple, a strength of will that he could barely even recognize now.

 

Maybe he passed out.

 

When he came to, there were two dogs snuffling at his decent hand, a beagle pup and a Kai Ken; no wonder Abigail couldn't tell. He didn't have the strength to pet them, even with a muzzle right beneath his palm. He felt like all his muscles were grated, useless.

 

Abigail and Hannibal were sitting at either end of the sofa. Hannibal's hand was running through his thin hair, and Abigail was on the floor, her head leant back against Will's legs. They'd lit candles from their well-protected hoard, which threw shadows around the unfamiliar walls. Two great, dark peaks seemed to rise up from Hannibal's shoulders, wing-like and warm and enveloping. They brushed Abigail's hair and shoulders, but didn't quite reach Will's prone body.

 

Gaps to let the lesser demons in.

 

He was losing consciousness again. It was such a damn struggle to pull out of it.

 

Such a goddamn struggle when he'd already spent a lifetime fighting.

 

"Well," Will heard Hannibal say, as he closed his eyes against it all. "Here we are at the end of the world, my dears. We are home."

 


End file.
